Daily Archives: August 6, 2012

Whilst ancedotes about Olympic fever are two a penny at the moment, do we actually have any evidence about how interested people are? Well these power demand charts, courtesy of the National Grid, perhaps offer one rough and ready way of looking at how engaged the stay at home audience has been at key points.

Firstly, of all the highest TV audience to date – the opening ceremony. The annotations on the charts are from analysts at the National Grid.

The pink line shows electricity demand for the equivalent Friday a year ago, and the blue line the actual demand during the opening ceremony – which drew an average of 22.4m viewers, the highest since 1998, and a peak audience at 9.45pm of 26.9m. Read more

Something I touched on in today’s coverage of the London school system is ethnicity: in short, everyone does better than white children, with poor white children particularly far behind. Here are 2010-11′s GCSE results, split by ethnicity, using the FT measure:

Some of the lines cut out suddenly: that is because there were fewer than 100 kids in those vingtiles, and the lines go absolutely nuts on such low sample sizes. For reference, when I say “white”, I mean pupils who have self-identified as “White British”.

That obviously has a regional effect: London has a lot of ethnic minority kids. But there is a chicken-and-egg question. Is the capital so good because it has these children, or do they do so well because they are in London? Well, the answer is “both”. Read more

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Welcome. FT data is a collaborative effort from journalists across the FT working in data journalism, statistics and data visualisation.

We aim to look at statistical issues in depth and provide original analysis of data. Occasionally we’ll also post guest contributions. Get in touch at ftdata@ft.com